The Samsung vs. Apple legal brouhaha has been a pretty tedious story to cover up until now, but over the last week, those of who with a professional interest in paying attention to the bickering were finally rewarded when Apple started coughing up images of their early iPhone prototypes in the court filings.

On Saturday, though, in preparation for the start of today’s trial, Apple released a new filing with dozens of sketches, prototypes and 3D models of early iPhone prototypes. We’ve seen some of them before, but a lot of them are new, and one thing that is abundantly clear is that back in 2006, Apple has already thought out every possible shape an iPhone could be.

We’ve put together a gallery below of all of Apple’s iPhone prototypes, culling the images from a longer slideshow from All Things D. Check it out: not only will you see iPhones that never made it in there, you’ll see the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4 and even a longer iPhone that could be the iPhone 5!

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pzumk

They look ridiculous ugly.

ddevito

They look ridiculous ugly.

That’s why they’re prototypes

extra_medium

Rectangle, rectangle, rectangle aaaaand rectangle. They got all the shapes

Christian Moesgaard

I like how one of them looks identical to Nokia’s Lumia.

lwdesign1

It’s interesting to note that Apple came up with all kinds of different possible designs for the iPhone before finally settling on the initial shape used for the 1G, 2G and 3G phones and the revised design for the 4 and 4S. Even Apple could come up with different ideas, yet Samsung and all the other copycats can only design what Apple finally decided on. Give consumers a break and “think different”.

bowlingGreen

It’s interesting to note that Apple came up with all kinds of different possible designs for the iPhone before finally settling on the initial shape used for the 1G, 2G and 3G phones and the revised design for the 4 and 4S. Even Apple could come up with different ideas, yet Samsung and all the other copycats can only design what Apple finally decided on. Give consumers a break and “think different”.

Your post is the most different-thinking one I’ve seen all day, thanks for being so unbiased and obviously pointing out how totally similar these devices look. NOT.

hanseich

there are many more missing though. Before the touch screen there was at least one WORKING phone that was more like an old iPod combined with a phone. That’s what I’d love to see.

About the author

John Brownlee is a Contributing Editor. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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